1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computing devices; more particularly, the present invention relates to computing devices that each provide at least two displays panels.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
A typical user interface in most portable computing devices has a single display for a human user to view data and a keyboard for the human user to enter data. However, almost all graphics cards, graphics controllers, and graphics processors sold today support multiple displays.—i.e., a user of any computer device having one of these cards, controller or processor can easily connect more than one display to the computing device. In addition, the, price of display panels has recently become low enough to make a multi-display environments affordable and to make possible many interesting applications. As a result, portable devices for games with two or more displays have been introduced (e.g., the Nintendo DS). Similarly, dual-screen notebook devices (e.g., the Acer Iconia) use the additional screen to provide additional viewable areas or to provide an on-screen virtual keyboard. However, these dual-display devices use the additional display mainly to provide additional viewable areas for a single user and support neither sharing of the additional display for use with multiple users, nor providing flexible display settings available in the dynamic multi-display environment.
Tablet devices, such as Apple Computer's “iPad,” are recently popularized computing devices with both a form factor and a computing power that rank between smartphones and notebooks. Following on the tablet devices are “hybrid laptops,” which are portable computing devices that can dynamically serve as either a “netbook” or a tablet, as required. As known to those skilled in the art, a netbook is a notebook computer customized for internet access applications. These hybrid laptops typically allow the display to be either detached from the keyboard body (e.g., the Lenovo's IdeaPad, or the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer) or “flipped around” to become a tablet (e.g., Dell Inspiron Duo flip-screen laptop). Some of these hybrid laptops support dynamic device and display setting.
These multiple-screen notebooks, detachable tablets, and flip-screen laptops enable a single computing device to be used by a single user in both notebook and tablet device applications, supporting increased viewable areas and virtual keyboard features.